Taste of Compassion
by dblauvelt
Summary: A story about the other war no one talks about any more as told by Victoria Waterfield, who is now a Tardis, as well as Romana, Zoe Herriot, Jamie McCrimmon, Compassion and the Tenth Doctor.
1. Excerpt from Victoria's abridged diary

Much like the stories of old, so did mine begin, long ago and far away. As did the ones Father would read at bedtime, this tale started somewhere small and unassuming: a tiny coffee shop nestled into the corner of a busy street one rainy day, tucked beneath a soft blanket of clouds the colour of slate. Yet that was where such a resemblance ended: in this fairy-tale, there was no knight in shining armor, no wondrous dream lands, no star-crossed lovers, no little boys and girls who could stop the world with a sword or a true heart.

Not now,  
not any more.

Up till a point, should I wish to tell it so, my own story might resemble such a bedtime tale, for it began the loss of my father to creatures of evil, of horrors that belonged to the nightmares of other beings, other worlds, not of our histories or legends. My knight and kind wizard swept me away from reality, preventing me from having to process that tragic loss, a wound that would quietly fester and bleed in the darkest of nights, hidden, but not forgotten. Eventually, I left them too. The choice to leave all those worlds and people behind was my own. Instead, I stepped out of their embrace and into the arms of an adopted family, and onto the pavement of a world many decades removed from the one I in which I was raised.

A home,  
a happy ending.

Simplicity, however, cannot exist in a universe governed by chaos. Father would have been pleased by such symmetry, if he were not stricken by grief at the knowledge of what would become of me.

Tragedy took away this new family soon enough, not with the trappings of epic loss or drama, but with the pains and jolts one suffers as a result of surviving adolescence, of establishing independence, of moving on. A kind card at the holidays, the casual visit and tea once a year remained to prop up t he façade of a typical family, but as I had once clung to the stories of my youth, or my father's side, or Jamie's arm over the years, I moved on once more, let go.

As one does,  
as one must.

That was why, sitting in the coffee shop on Heaton Terrace that Sunday morning in Shropshire, when I saw the red-headed waitress smile at me, I felt the world around me fracture, much like the sharp snap when the spine of a book cracks in your hands. The two halves of my world became disjointed, severed, yet loosely connected. The novel can still be read, but it feels irreparably wrong.

In that jolted moment, I felt the overwhelming urge to run to my lost father, to bury my face in his warm jacket, to wrap my small remembered arms around him. To return to simple stories and their happy endings.

For what I saw within in this strange woman's blue eyes was both something new and something old: a return to a world divorced so long from my mundane present, but one somehow new. And terrible. Over time, the pages of my story had yellowed and curled, and in my absence, the rules had changed. The world I now glimpsed was fierce with colour, with challenge, with complexity. Should I return, it was not one that I was certain I could survive.

I was to later learn that this woman's name was Compassion, but no such kindness from her was ever paid to me.

Since that day, I have been betrayed, tortured, and abused; a pawn in a war that has torn asunder the veil of time, a war that has repeatedly obliterated every world that has ever felt the warm breath of a sun. I was once a human born into the nineteenth century, but have since been transformed by treachery and deceit into a mockery of life, an enslaved creature bound by fire and fate: I have been crafted into a ship of time.

My name is Victoria Waterfield, and this is my story.


	2. War101

You continue to read, which I do find slightly surprising: the past is often a difficult story to tell, which might be an apparent contradiction, but I think you ascertain my meaning. History is often discolored, generalized, or… distasteful. Often, it is forgotten in favor of new colors, experiences. Willingly. For, the past, after all is, is full of people who are 'not like' you. Nor should they be.

As I, of all people, should know.

Understanding requires context, and this I do understand the value. I will not however dye my roots blonde, wear garments that are too close-fitting or regale you with exploits that are either meaningless or trite in order to garner your favour. While I am capable of altering my external appearance with the merest thought, I maintain my own form, my human form, not only to preserve my sanity, but for the very simple reason that it is who I am, or at least who I was, and I shall not compromise myself for the purposes of this narrative.

Context, however, I can provide. It is not, by any means, given with pity, but in this case it cannot be avoided. Sadly, I'll admit. For in many ways, my story is not mine to tell:

****  
"You do realize that in many Level Four societies, the constant reconfiguration of interior personal spaces is often perceived as manifestation of an unstable psyche, often the result of a significant trauma?"

"Umm… yes. Probably." The Doctor, inhabiting his mutual tenth/eleventh incarnation, absently flicked a switch that dimmed the console room lighting slightly before, hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, he turned to face the blond lady who reclined padded bench regally as if it were a Louis XV Bergere chair. "Although if that were true, I should probably mold the console out of plasticine. Please, and don't take this in anyway personally, as it is always a pleasure, but, Madame President, what are you doing in my TARDIS? I mean, you are sort of, well... Actually there is no polite way to put it so, really, plainly, you are sort of dead… Or, perhaps, not?"

Romana looked at him archly, one perfect eyebrow lifted upon her pale forehead.

"Or…" The Doctor continued, somewhat flustered, although it was a comfortable sort of flustered, as if he were adopting long-used and familiar emotions as one might shrug into an old jumper. "Or possibly… possibly not dead?" At her continued silence, the Doctor pressed on, a frown deepening upon his thin, comic face. "Romana, please don't tell me you're a ghost... that's so… so…"

"Prosaic?" Romana laughed, her blond hair shifting hues between gold and amber under the pulsing lights of the time rotor. "No."

"No, you're not a ghost, or no, you're not dead, or no, you're not alive?"

"Yes." Romana breathed simply, as if that solved everything.

The Doctor raised his own eyebrows, opened his mouth, the closed it. "It's good to know somethings haven't changed…" he ventured finally.

"That's exactly the reason why I was sent here."

"Sent here? Who by?"

"Yes." Romana smiled again.

****  
It is important to remember that during the War, the Enemy rarely showed itself, relying instead upon more prolific, and expendable forces, those armed and equipped with their own technology. For this reason, it may never be clear when the first battle was ever actually fought. I certainly do not know, and I have little interest in discovering this fact.

I had very little interest in anything for most of the War.

While depression may often lead to suicide, the truly depressed hold a secret, one that is closely guarded, but only for the reason that to speak of it would require effort: suicide requires effort and identity of purpose. They may even tell you this secret, if they can be bothered to get out of bed- for truly, they would rather sleep and escape to a life completely removed from the misery in which waking traps them.

Immortals in particular have a monopoly on depression, and climb to emotional peaks and plummeted to lows the likes of which no Ephemeral can ever imagine. I have reluctantly become Immortal, however in my form the luxury of sleep is denied me- the ever pulsing throbbing of the white hole that is my soul prevents such tranquility.

I can however, sunbathe. On the best beaches in the Universe. True, this too will pale, ironically, with time, but I had only been 'birthed' a thousand years ago, this pleasure has yet to wind down into repetition and despair.

I repeat, interest in the War, I had none. And so I wished it had remained.

I was however, unfortunate enough to be present on an occasion when the Enemy did show their hand, within the confines of the Worldsphere. I was also unfortunate enough to survive. God was not so lucky.

Many Timeships waltz around with their bellies swarming with passengers, but I find it to be in incredibly poor taste, the utmost violation of personal space. Often have I regretted ever burdening the Doctor's vessel with even my own limited presence. During the War, the Worldsphere was the first time that I was aware that this quirk was to have any benefit at all.

There are few other bastions in the Universe that ever outmatched Gallifrey's empire for scale and audacity, but the People eclipsed such stiff, cloak and dagger-heavy worlds by encasing their entire solar system within a shell and powering it with a supercomputer, God, who was personable enough to pop now and again, often with a large yellow smiley-faced avatar.

Often Gallifreayan agents would travel to the Worldsphere to attempt to limit the People's experiments in time technology. I was there for the shopping. And the beaches. Mainly the beaches. God promised to keep the time-agents off my tail in exchange for the occasional data pull from my comparator circuits. After all, what did I care about Gallifreyan technology? Or, for that matter, their antiquarian laws and restrictions?

Sunbathing was not something I did a great deal of growing up in England, certainly not on pristine white beaches lapped by gentle, azure blue water and sipping from mint-laced iced tea that hovered on a forcefield beside me. In an earlier century, I would have worried for the fate of my skin, but there are one or two benefits from having an exterior plasmic shell. My earlier, human self, might have felt lonely, but it was now a state I much preferred. It was not, however, to last.

The initial attack is difficult to describe in parochial terms, and perhaps was easier to visualize from outside the Worldsphere: the Enemy blasted through the exterior crust and rammed their battle cruisers through the shell and burst up through the ocean floor. Had I still possessed human eyes, I would have not witnessed the event itself, for although the ocean did extend to the 'horizon' beyond before gently curving up towards the sky, such was the distance it would have precluded such an observation. With my augmented vision however, I could see the ships piercing the horizon, could hear the roar of the water streaming out through the portal and into space. Could see the blasts as People, and Also People, reacted to the attack, already swarming and strafing the sides of the Enemy's vessels.

I groaned. And lay back on my towel. My vacation was essentially ruined, but such was the vastness of the Worldsphere that I could still spend a few more hours relaxing before the assault came anywhere near me. I did have to snatch at my glass of tea though; the power for such minor things as forcefield generators was being re-routed to address more critical needs, probably like air and gravity. I sipped slowly, sloshing around the grainy bits of sugar that swam about the bottom of the glass. It still tasted bitter. One of the many things I have not yet discovered about becoming a hybrid timeship is where food or fluids go upon intake. I have no desire to find out. But still, the tea did not taste quite right. Guilt, which I had foresworn, had somehow laced my pleasure, its tang at once both oily and unpleasant.

I sighed, packed up my towel and slowly walked along the shoreline, watching the battle unfold above my head in the 'sky' that was both day and night. Occasional cracks of thunder would wash upon the beach. Snatches of news reports sloshed against my circuits, their burbling screaming above the roar of the waves. The People were losing, dying in the billions. The Also People were also losing. Even God was losing.

I actually found it slightly depressing. Quiet vacation spots are really hard to find these days.

I kept walking. It passed the time. If nothing else, observing the obliteration of the Worldsphere was more interesting than anything else I had planned for the next millennia or two. I found a dead Also Person five miles up the coast, it's external shell seemed intact, but a quick nudge of my toe, and a gentle thrust of an Olave-Thurston probe, told me that the link between its hyper-spatial core had been severed. In biomechanical speak, its 'neck' had been snapped. While its metal body lay quiet upon the sand, somewhere in hyperspace its machine mind was writhing, dislocated and dispossessed. The use of the word 'machine' in this world, instead of 'Person', was considered quite un-PC, but given the current state of affairs, there was no one was around to care.

The level of weaponry required to accomplish this hyper-spatial neck-snapping, however, was quite alarming.

Extruding an old 35mm black and white camera into my palm, I took a picture or two, different angles, different exposures. It has been said that art is the realm of the insane. In my case, my interest in photography was a result of a thousand years of boredom, but that is not to say that art, boredom and insanity are not all very close neighbors in our minds. It is genius that can knock down the thin fences that separate them and cause everything to go a bit awry and serial-killery.

Without the forcefields active to hold the external shell together, it was remarkable how vulnerable the metal corpse was to the licks and tugs of the gentle wind that blew off the ocean; how quickly rivulets of sand trickled and tickled the darkened innards.

If I'd been more aware of my surroundings, both geospatially and temporally, I might have been more prepared for what happened next. But I wasn't. And I got what I deserved. There is, after all, no such thing as an innocent bystander, and I have long ceased to possess anything resembling innocence.

To be fair, it happened incredibly quickly. And it was incredibly hurtful. I only now realize how pre-meditated the attack on the Worldsphere was, against all of us. There must have been agents preparing this assault for quite some time, although whether they comprised People or Faction agents, I'm not sure to this day.

I was close to the city , Ajangi-Santu, by that time, close enough to see the citizens running from the burning ruins as Dalek ships streaked out of the sky, blasting the gleaming domes and citadels. Saucers clashed against the People that flew at them from all sides, some in last-ditch suicide runs, slamming against the sides of the assault cruisers.

All of which I was aware of, but really wasn't paying much attention- would that I had.

I was staring in disbelief: one assault vehicle was blasting at some poor fool who was running along the beach towards me, sand exploding on either side of him. A cursory scan told me who he was.

In my travels, of course I've seen a few things. And by that I mean people. And by that, of course, I mean the Doctor, in various bodies. I've kept my distance though; I have my reasons. Former companions, however, I have encountered many, and have spoken to several. They have a glow about them that makes them fairly easy to discern, a halo of artron energy, although some are more imbued than others. Several in fact, I have seen recently on the Worldsphere: the archeologist, the red-haired creep, and the wonderful Kadiatu Lethbridge Stuart.

Despite this, I would never have expected to see Jamie McCrimmon running towards me in hail of Enemy plasma bolts. I reacted without thinking, embraced him, opened to him, felt him tumble into my console room. I slammed shut the doors against the burning assault and dematerialized.

I was not to know, for I had not scanned, I had not the time that surgically implanted within the guts of my beloved Scotsman, was a bomb. It detonated immediately upon dematerialization.

I never even had time to say hello to him, which was cruel.

But I, too, was busy dying.

Which would have been a blessing.


	3. Voo Don't

Sometimes people in myths, usually military ones, sleep with one eye open.

I live with one door open, permanently anchored. No matter where the rest of my body might be, there is a secondary door leading out from my central console room to the parapet of Simyong-Sen's castle on Aritrope XVII.

It was the only thing that saved me.

Within the belly of Jamie had been placed a gruber. Grubers, in Ancient times when the Universe was still new and joyous, were once considered a very rare gift, a pet. Place within the heart of a sun, the tiny gruber would take the last wish of its user, and with it reshape the solar system into that image. I never learned the wish that the Enemy tech must have made when this gruber eviscerated my best friend and ruptured the heart of the white hole that lay beneath my console; I only had enough time to shut down the real-world interface and crawl out my own backside. Not a pretty visual. It wasn't terribly fun to experience either.

On the plus side, had I been an actually Gallifreyan time-ship, the gruber would have restructured the Eye of Harmony, which would have devastated… well, every legitimate Gallifreyan vessel then in existence.

Lying gasping on the edge of the castle turret on that distant alien world, I watched purple clouds churn and buck above me in the spring monsoons, and I found myself giving thanks to my unusual genesis.

When I said that I spied a world within Compassion's eyes that I did not think I would survive, it was perhaps not the world you might expect. I was fully human before I met her, and knew not her true nature. I was however a single woman in a world completely removed from my own, transported to that of England in the 1970s. When she smiled at me in that café, I did not anticipate eternal life, time ships, exploding suns or pain, but something else entirely…

Well, perhaps a _little_ bit of pain.

*  
Zoe Herriot thrust the rabbit up into the air, and savagely slashed the razor blade across the creature's throat. As she chanted couplets intoned in a raspy, weary voice, the bunny's thick, rich blood splattered down to fall upon the sand at her feet, slowly seeping into the intricate carvings that she'd scratched into the sand. The blood bubbled and frothed angry and warm against the skin of her bare feet as the air before her writhed and crackled.

There was a _whump_ and suddenly a food cart, the kind air hostesses push up and down aeroplane aisles, appeared before her, its hot, aluminum-wrapped meals steaming quietly in the cold, damp air of the cave.

Zoe swore. Violently.

Then with a quick shake of the head, she ignored the oddly appearing cart and carried the body of the rabbit lovingly to a surgical table that was tucked just out of sight. She quickly attached to tiny IV's to the little rabbit arms, one of saline and one of rabbit blood, before she gently swabbed the neck wound with antiseptic. With practiced movements, she whipped out the tissue generator and applied it to the animal's neck, sealing the ruptured veins, arteries and epidermal tissues. She paused, placing a finger to the rabbit's chest cavity, her head tilted as if listening intently.

Zoe swore again, but wasted no time in applying to tiny paddles to either side of the small, furry body. There was a zinnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggg and then a johump! The little ball of fur arched into the air before falling against the table, its chest expanding slowly first, then rising and falling slightly with more regularity.

Zoe gave a sigh and gave the bunny a gentle rub on its head. The anesthetic she'd given it an hour before would wear off soon, and hopefully, it would remember nothing of the whole 'sacrificial altar' episode.

Zoe really, really, really despised Faction 'technology.'

Zoe stepped back into the cave and stared at the meal cart that sat incongruously in the center of the cave. She hated Faction pseudoscience even more vehemently because it actually worked. Mostly anyway. A quick inspection revealed that the incantation had brought her another dratted SIDRAT, again. It was a Space and Inter-Dimensional Robot All-purpose Transporter she'd seen used by a renegade bunch of Time Lords: fleeting power source, low grade plasma coils and slightly iffy dimensional stability. Although used in a pinch for troop transport, even the Time Lords found them low end. It was a bit like using a push bike to get around instead of a jumbo jet. They must be getting desperate. Or must have been... Or will be... Or will have been..

Zoe had acquired dozens of the wretched things- all of them near the edge of their life span with depleted power sources, no passengers and almost always damaged real-world interfaces: in short, abandoned husks damaged in the war. Interestingly, all of them had a chameleon circuit jerry-rigged into them, almost as an afterthought. Still, if she stuck all of the carcasses in front of the cave's entrance, she could be classed as time-trash, perhaps appear on chat shows.

Instead, she stuck a hand up the drinks dispenser, tapped a series of code into the console without even having to look and jerked her hand free as the cart gave a heavy sigh and faded out of existence to join the rest of her collection that she tucked just out of reality, obeying her command to materialize within the others. On the one hand, Zoe hoped that by having them appear inside each other might create some interesting dimensional instability of scientific interest, as no one had ever tried it before, but really she only did it so that they wouldn't feel too lonely in death. It was irrational, and the entire reason she couldn't use the capsules were that they lacked sentience, but after her many months of working with the Faction, more and more of her irrational nature had manifested itself.

Zoe walked to the cave entrance, squatted down and sat with her legs crossed and watched the leafy tops of Puerto Rican rain forest heave and swelter before her as they swept out towards the open Caribbean Sea. The mouth of the cave was cloaked by a camofield: she was hiding out. The Faction knew she was hiding out, of course, so it wasn't truly hiding by any definition of the word. And she knew that they knew that she was hiding. And so it went. Her participation in their ranks was, well… Zoe, an outcast in every social group and situation she had ever been in found it perverse that even in the Faction circles, who were by definition, the most outcast of all casts, appeared to distance themselves from her, if they were not openly irritated by her presence. After some rather ghastly faux paux's that she preferred not to dwell on in much detail, Zoe had scuttled away to this island, close enough to the old-fashion power of Earth voodoo, but not close enough to offend any of the loa practitioners, although there were so few left after the War, most of the inadvertently wiped out by an Enemy sortie that the Faction had not been party to, but that, in Zoe's eyes, served them right for playing the two sides against each other.

To be honest, Zoe wasn't entirely sure if there were any Faction even left, so isolated had she been lately, if one wanted to be linear about the whole affair.

While all of Zoe's base instincts had been telling her for nearly a year to 'get out, run, run, run' away from the Faction, what intrigued her to the point of distraction was how on Earth it could be even vaguely possible that by gutting a chicken, ripping out its innards and splashing them about in a small bowl while chanting obscene nursery rhymes in Latin could in anyway disrupt the fabric space time continuum.

The fact was, they did. And it well and truly bothered her, because there was nothing, simply nothing that Zoe could not comprehend. It was what she did, it was who she was and, quite incidentally, it was what well and truly constantly pissed everyone else off around her. One thing, however, was certain: after all she had been through, after all of the chickens she had surgically restructured and, in one instance, resuscitated with mouth to mouth, she wasn't as hell about to give up now…

… and she had an idea. Grinning a slow smile, Zoe leapt to her feet and sprinted back into the cave.


	4. Bloodtide

Blood. In all the old stories, it always come back to blood. It might be a blood line, it might be a scar, or a violent death, but in every story, the hero/ine always is wounded, always sees the ones they care about hurt. For blood, after all, is life and life is bood. It is with us in birth, and explosion of blood, and so do we die. Our life is marked by blood, the ones we kill to eat, to wear, to survive. To love.

There is a reason why blood features so predominantly in the lore of Timelords and Daemons. Of the Enemy and of the Faction.

Perhaps I am not what you expected, not what you wanted. I can only say that I am not what I once was, but also offer that one does not have to be transformed into a multidimensional, trans-temporal vehicle to experience such change of personality or aspect. The difference a human experiences progressing from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-two, for example, produces changes within and upon such an ephemeral individual more dramatically, and more subtly, than any chameleon circuit could accomplish or duplicate.

Now imagine taking an upper-class, sheltered girl from the middle of the nineteenth century and dropping her into the middle of the twentieth. In London, 1969, at the age of twenty, with very little money and a mind keen with wisdom of Yeti, Daleks, Cybermen, and hyper-sentient, flesh-eating, seaweed. A mind on the one hand open to everything, and on the other hand one, at least compared to anyone else my age in that time and space, experienced in nothing. Meeting Compassion that day in the coffee shop was both of monumental import and significant of nothing. Nor will I speak of it in detail. There are certain parts of my past that belong only to me, and will remain so.

I will only say that at the time, while I was breathless and shocked at the newness, at the strangeness, of the otherworldliness of our encounters, I do not believe, in retrospect, that she felt any of this. I doubt that she felt anything at all. To her it was more than an experiment; it was survival, of a kind. Of her kind. I was unaware of her true intentions until a single, final moment.

But we are not yet there, although this moment has long since past. We have only arrived at the moment where I lay upon the castle-top, eviscerated and grieving the loss of my best friend, the loss of my core, the loss of yet another stage of my existence, the burning fire of a dying sun blistering the remains of my inside. I lay as nothing more than a husk, and a growing certainness of what had happened to me.

For I knew, if only a hunch, that all of what had just happened, dear reader, was a trap. As I lay beneath the sky, my plasmic hull dripping arton energy into the stone of the citadel, dreaming dreams of the night Compassion seduced me, the Enemy pounced. They came from the shadows, they came swift and violent.

Weakened, dying, I could do nothing. I would like to say that I was kidnapped, would like to say that I was imprisoned, would like to even say that I was tortured, which is certainly a strange thing to say. But no, there is another word, a more horrific term for what befell me:

I was harvested.

Nor was I the only one.

It would be inaccurate to say that I later 'awoke', but perhaps 'regained awareness' would be suitable. I wish, mind, that I hadn't. In many ways, I never truly did awake for there was an underlying subwave that permeated the entire planet, scrambling signals, prohibiting blocktransfer computations or even coherent thought. Yet I could see, and I could later remember.

The facility was old, grimy, on a world where the air itself was greasy, hugging surfaces in globules and wet sighs of sludge. The factory was immense, and we, possessing all sizes, shapes and dimensions, were crammed into its harrowing confines, our sides and feet scraping and groaning, dull listless eyes and scanners and screens only possessing enough spirit to take in the cables and wires that spewed out from within our doors and portals, the snake like wires writhing and slipping through the murky air and walls before slithering out and up into the walls. There was the slow, disturbing sloshing sound of fluids being pumped, sucked, slurped away into the darkened distance…

Too drained to move, too weak to dematerialize, no longer alive, not yet dead, we were trapped in an endless hell.

A particular hell, for me. One I had experienced once before. Lying helpless, vulnerable, in a fog of damp, and pain- all familiar. But before it had been of passion- for me, but not for her. I can say, that night I took Compassion back to my flat, that I did not know what I was doing, but that would be a lie. I knew what I wanted and I played along willingly, although it is fair to say I did not then know the rules of this particular game.

She was drawn to me, my halo of Artron energy teasing, whispering to her like a wil'o'the wisp. A perfume that I was unaware I was wearing. There was wine, as there always is-more symbolism, two glasses on the night stand, barely touched. A kiss is a kiss, but when it is a forbidden kiss, the sensation escalates logarithmically. But this touch was nothing so simple as one bound in the auspices of fleeting morals of an ephemeral society. Her breath was laced with the heady scent of block transfer computations, irresistible to my future self who hovered just outside the moment. We gulped, and kissed and curled and twisted, spinning, straining, groaning, wheez- the crescendo was building, subliminally, echoing from beyond hearing, a call from the beyond bursting into reality with a breathless surge. At the penultimate moment, when I lost control and for a shuddering, long moment left my body, my tremulous cry changed tenor: as the teeth of my lover penetrated my skin.

Light flooded through my veins, roaring into my head, covering every cell, every vesicle, every chromosome, every nerve ending in a crescendo of pain.

That was my second birth, one human evolution had never prepared me to suffer through. So this then, lying in this factory dying a slow, eternal death, must be my second death.

I wish that I had not been versed in human history so that I would never have so quickly understood what was being done to me, done to us.

We were being drained, to the brink of destruction, our life energies being drawn to fuel the Enemy's expanding timefleet. Fallen soldiers, our blood was being siphoned away to be used to fuel the front line troops, keep them healthy and fighting.

All the while there were the persistent hacking and cutting sounds as the Enemy carved up some of our fellows for spare parts.


	5. Back in the Saddle

I've come to apologise,' said God.

Amy blinked. This wasn't really how she imagined her Tuesday afternoon when she skipped out early from work to run errands. Now she was sitting at a bus stop, groceries tucked between her feet, her purse clutched anxiously her lap because, to be honest, the little Scottish man beside her on the bench holding a queer handled umbrella was deeply creeping her out.

Oh, and then there was the large, two metre-wide yellow sphere bobbing in the air in front of her with a smiley face digitially etched across its visage that seemed to think that she was someone named 'Bernice'.

'I have to admit, I don't often have cause to apologise, so you'll pardon me if I'm not very good at it.' God went on.

And the large yellow ball, by the way, the Scottish man sitting next to her had quickly explained a moment, is God. Or at least as close as it gets these days. And it was apologizing to her. And Rory wasn't here to see it.

'And while this message is a recording, I hope that doesn't detract from the emotional experience of my apology.'

The little man beside her waved at the air absently with the umbrella. 'Would you mind fast-forwarding to the important bits? I'm crossing several time-streams here… going to give the vortex terrible heartburn in a few centuries from now.'

It was at that moment when Amy sortof knew, to a point, who the Scottish man with the terrible fashion sense- and that God, of all people, was apologizing to- must, most probably be...

The Doctor flashed a scowl at Amy's long, overly-dramatic groan, and turned back to God. Or at least to the inter-dimensional extrusion of the supercomputer that ran the WorldSphere that called itself God.

God's smiley face flickered, stuttered in and out of the air in front of them.

'What's the matter?' Amy pressed herself into the bus bench, trying to pull away from the flashing sphere.

'Something's very wrong… as usual. God's been trying to reach me, apparently, but the message is scattered, failing to find a temporal lock… and when God can't find me, I'm sure the subroutines simply scanned Earth searching for Artron signatures and found you… and assumed I'd find you as well. Pleasure to meet you, Miss Willams, but please try to forget you ever met me. Will make things simpler when I get round to meeting you for the first time later.'

Amy supposed she should be thrilled that there was a Scottish incarnation of the Doctor, but to be honest she was a bit peeved that she'd never pick up the dry cleaning at this rate. Still, at least the creepy vibe was now gone… and so was God, at least every other three seconds. 'Artron energy?'

'Fuels the TARDIS, you lot wear it like a cloud when you leave, still some of it wafting about you. Made it easy for God to find you… amoung others…'

'Sorry, TARDIS b.o.?'

'If you like..' The Doctor had lost interest in their conversation and instead was fiddling with a device that resembled an iPod that had been left in a heated fondue pot.

He pressed a button.

God's smiley mouth puckered into a surprised **:0**

And with a POP, God was gone.

Amy gaped. And felt slightly depressed. She was kinda getting used to the floating guy. 'What just happened?'

The Doctor slipped the device into his pocket and stood up, swinging the umbrella up onto his shoulder. 'There wasn't sufficient bandwidth for audio/visual, had to download the message as binary files into here,' he said patting his pocket with his free hand.

'Lighter than stone tablets, I suppose…' Amy felt she had to banter a bit while her brain tried to catch up. Some things with the Doctor never changed. 'But what actually just happened?'

The Doctor spoke, but it was low and grumpy, the syllables drifting on the wind behind him as he strode rapidly away. Amy had to run after him to catch them before they faded away. 'God is dead, God's world is dead, my friends are dead, and I'm very much afraid, all of you are going to be next…'

The groceries, forgotten and teased absently by slight gusts and drafts, huddled under the bench as a light rain began to patter down from a tired sky.


End file.
